Vague Patch Notes: When World of Warcraft breaks off your friendship

I spent a bunch of time post-BlizzCon thinking about why World of Warcraft personally bothered me. Not why its design pitfalls bothered me; that’s easy to understand, and frankly, it’s a case of whatever. It’s no different than Star Wars: The Old Republic fumbling unnecessarily for direction and making more missteps all the while, or Guild Wars 2 spending a year of pretending constant holiday events counted as content, or the litany of things going wrong with WildStar. But WoW felt different to me. It felt personal. And after spending a lot of time thinking about it, I think I’ve figured out why. Unfortunately, explaining it means getting pretty relentlessly self-indulgent, and it’s not really about mechanical sides of things. But I suspect some of it might not be unique to me, and I’d like to think that it’s at least entertaining in the same way that other depressing stories are entertaining. So if you’re not in the mood for some self-indulgent reflection, you know where the back button is on your browser; otherwise, let’s talk about the worst feelings of rejection. This probably will not surprise anyone, but I was not a popular child when I was growing up. Some of this was due to factors I had control over and didn’t realize when I was younger, some of it was due to factors not under my control, and some of it was just due to the sort of person I was period. It’s been at least two decades… [Read full story]